Even though I was 21 months older than my brother, Charles McPhee, I looked up to him. I loved stepping into his world. On his bedroom wall growing up, he had plastered the iconic Apollo 8 “Earthrise” photograph, a huge image of the Earth floating like a blue-tipped marble in a sea of black space, the moon’s ruddy surface in the foreground. We used to stare at it together.
“Check it out, Larkin," he'd say. "We’re on the moon!" He prompted me to dream, asking if I could imagine the billions of people on the globe, floating in the universe. As he reminded me, we were just tiny specks in a great big world.
When I heard him speak that way, I could feel my sense of self lifting up, away from earthly restraints. Charles always had a knack for seeing the bigger picture, for celebrating the beauty and awe of the world and our place in it.
And at age 45, I had to confront a truly horrifying scenario. Back then, Charles was the host of a popular radio show on dream interpretation, and callers started pointing out that he was slurring his speech on-air. He hadn't noticed. Listeners asked, unhelpfully, “Is Charles drunk?” One said, “If he is, I know someone who can get him help.”
He was most certainly not: Charles was soon diagnosed with the fatal neurodegenerative disease ALS. Hearing that news felt like I, too, had received a death sentence.
Charles was my best friend and creative soulmate. Growing up, we had encouraged each other to pursue non-traditional careers: him as a dream expert and host of the nationally syndicated radio program, The Dream Doctor Show; and me as a documentary filmmaker working mostly for PBS.
But when Charles became ill in 2006, it never occurred to me to turn the camera on him and document his story, despite his Hollywood good looks, his radiant radio personality, or his fierce courage when confronted with insurmountable odds. I think I was in too much pain. Instead I kept making documentaries for PBS and took the best advice I ever got in this unfolding tragedy from my husband, which was to visit Charles and his family in California as often as I could.
One of Charles’s great qualities was that he always was thinking about everyone else. After his diagnosis, he seemed more worried about my parents and the fallout of losing their son, and the impacts on his family, rather than his own mortality. He took great care in writing emails to all of us, spanning five years, explaining that he was doing OK. He described ALS as “no match for the human spirit.” Remarkably, he never once complained about his disease.
When he died at age 49 in 2011, I was heartbroken. I kept making films — movies about caregiving, fertility, and psychedelic medicine — for PBS. But over the next decade, the ache in my heart did not diminish. In those years, I began to fear losing memories of our spectacular friendship. So I decided to write my book — I’ll See You In My Dreams — to share him with the world and to keep him close to me.
Not long after he was diagnosed, Charles had a dream about being blind, which he interpreted as his unwillingness to acknowledge the severity of his illness. It was a wake-up call for him to push through his denial, and to live as fully as he could, even in the face of death. He even wrote an article for The Princeton Alumni Review (created by his alma mater) to share his enlightened perspective with others:
“Today I am buoyed along in the currents of a quick-moving river; as they say, you’re never more alive than when you’re standing next to death. I realize I have entered a new community — the vast legions of people living with illness, cancer, and other bad diagnoses — and I am hardly alone. Most dramatic is my liberation from the illusion of time — that there always will be more time to see a friend, to repair a marriage, to spend time with a child, to develop a hobby, or to concentrate on one’s spiritual life. There will not always be more time, even for those who are healthy. I have learned that in death’s mirror, the magic and beauty of life truly are illuminated. It feels good not to be blind.”
Writing about my brother helped me to preserve the memories of our time together over 49 years, and to recall exquisitely specific moments with him: Describing a vivid dream to him (I'd imagined a neon-lit jungle in rich color, with a green bird flitting about) in our high school years; both of us peering through a telescope at quasars, one of the most distant luminous objects in the known universe; or, finally, being present with him and his wife over the phone when he left this world. I wanted his two daughters, ages five and almost eight months old when he died, to understand their father in all his dimensions.
Call it a revolutionary or untamed unspirit, but Charles always bucked convention. At age 20, he had decided to follow his intuition rather than the life plan mapped by teachers, mentors, and parents. He took a year off college to work in Antarctica, where he mostly shoveled snow. Our father was steaming mad, because Charles wasn't following a traditional path to success. But that decision was a character-defining moment in Charles’s life.
He handwrote copious letters home to the family, detailing the exotic beauty of this faraway land, his love of life, and the importance of hard work. His exceptional work habits were rewarded with the unique opportunity (rare for first-timers) to travel further south over the icy continent to the research station Siple, which sits close to the planet’s south magnetic pole. While writing my book, I mined all that material and saw it crisply in my mind's eye, as if it were long-lost stock footage.
His illness, while important to my book, was only the backdrop to the story of our close sibling relationship, which spanned nearly five decades. In addition to recounting my favorite memories of and with Charles, I pulled from his letters, a book he wrote on lucid dreaming, his dreams, my dreams, his radio show commentary, my diary entries, and the five years of his emails when he became ill.
It would turn out that I was reliving all the many positive memories of our time together, rather than spiraling into traumatic memories of him losing control over every inch of his body, to this brutal disease. All this gathering of material helped me to realize that Charles was the most important influencer in my life, long before “influencers” were a thing.
Even as he lost daily ground to this cruel disease, Charles stayed several steps ahead of me and our family, guiding us through the challenges of the illness and end-of-life decisions he so carefully thought through. (He unburdened the family by making his wishes clear: no feeding tubes or breathing machines.) Like most Americans, he wanted to live and die in his own home. Our family rallied around him to make that possible.
Through his odyssey, I always thought that Charles heeded the words of the poet Rilke, who wrote, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.” Barely able to breathe, Charles stole as many last days on Earth as he could to watch his beautiful daughters blossom, and to feel more embraces from his loving wife. He lived to the “limits of his longing,” as Rilke so aptly put it.
Most impressive of all was how Charles showed up in the world — always fully present to see life’s magic and beauty, no matter what the future held. With my book, I wanted to capture Charles’s spirit, his guiding light, and share it with you.
Larkin McPhee is a Peabody and Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker whose debut memoir, I'll See You In My Dreams: A Sister’s Memoir (available for purchase here) explores how the love between siblings can shape a life forever.
